California, the state that governs by popular vote, has been trapped by its own sense of fairness.
Fifteen years ago voters there amended the state’s constitution through a referendum to declare that race could not be considered as a factor in university admissions.
But the same voters agreed in public opinion polls it would be a good thing if college campuses looked pretty much like main street — with about the same mix of Latinos, blacks, whites and Asians.
That wasn’t exactly the way it worked out.
Today at the University of California at Berkeley — the most prestigious of the state’s public universities — the freshman class this coming fall will be 30 percent white and 46 percent Asian. The Asian population of the state is a little more than 11 percent.
In a state where Latinos make up half the K-12 public school enrollment, only 15 percent of entering Berkeley students are Hispanic and only 4 percent are African Americans even though 7 percent of the population is black.
This will come as no surprise to Berkeley instructors and administrators. When the state was forced by the amendment to disregard race when setting entrance requirements the result was easy to anticipate. Entrance examinations and high school achievement records were used, instead.
For reasons primarily cultural, Asian students scored higher on those measures than any other racial group. They scored high because education is seen by Asian families as an avenue to success and because Asian families respect generational responsibilities: meaning parents are expected to set goals for their children and the children are expected to spend the time and effort required to come as close as their abilities will allow them to meet those goals. The parents, finally, provide their children with the physical and psychological support they need to get to the top of their class and stay there.
These values, and work habits, persist and account for the fact that a disproportionate share of the advanced degrees in math and the sciences granted in U.S. universities of prestige go to Asians.
ALL OF THAT is well and good. But the result is not university campuses that mirror the non-university demography, which is also what the man on the street in Sacramento, San Francisco or Camarilla considers ideal. Popular opinion wants it both ways: For heaven’s sake, don’t use race as a criterion. That’s institutionalizing racism. But, let’s do have just enough affirmative action so the campuses of KU, OU, and all of the other state universities and colleges of U-Name-It look pretty much like their downtowns.
Are these incompatible goals?
The U.S. Supreme Court will tackle a part of that question soon. It has accepted the case of a woman who declares she was denied admission at the University of Texas because of its race-conscious admissions policy. She is white. She claims other applicants who were Hispanic and African American were enrolled who were no better qualified than she, only because of the color of their skin.
The court will, in other words, have an opportunity to revisit affirmative action. If their ruling is a strong, straight-forward reversal of its endorsement of affirmative action about a decade ago, Kansas and most of the other 50 states that now go for deliberate, race-based diversification in their student admission decisions will join California’s “only the smartest, please” regimen.
That probably won’t be a good thing.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
